Climate geopoetics (the earth is a composted poem)

Abstract

This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics. The first section addresses recent literary work that engages with climate change and the Anthropocene and outlines the geopoetic field as it is currently emerging as a subfield of the geohumanities. Next, I turn to examining climate narratives and frames; following the lead of many human geographers and environmental humanities scholars, I approach climate change as a social and cultural issue. I then discuss the methodology of this particular climate geopoetics project, commenting on and contextualizing some of my writing and thinking process for the climate poems that are woven throughout the article. By centering this article around three poems, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics, the curious nature of the Anthropocene/Anthroposcene as a concept that both centers and de-centers the human, and the tensions on textual form that geopoetic practices create. It is my hope that this project may offer a fresh and unconventional approach to examining the multiple ways that climate change is framed, engaged, and contested.

Geopoetics: Storytelling against mastery

“…I start with a found poem I composed based on Eric Magrane’s (2021) article ‘Climate Geopoetics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’. I do this because I am not a poet, yet I readily take up Magrane’s invitation to conceive of a geopoetic practice as an open form in which we as readers, listeners, reviewers, or writers are invited to share in making meaning through reorganizing the wor(l)d. I take this to be the central and key invitation extended by geopoetics as a critical and creative practice while grappling with (inter)disciplinary forms, frames, and narratives of climate change.…”

Geopoetics: On organising, mourning, and the incalculable

“…I start my commentary with this story because I want to underline several ways in which Magrane’s climate poems operate and do work within and beyond the page. When Magrane (2021) writes that ‘a poem is a reorganisation of matter’ and geopoetics ‘a compressed energy construct’, he does not mean this figuratively. Rather, the climate poems literally reorganise matter and energy for readers, for listeners, and for Magrane himself.…”

“…This work of reorganisation necessarily extends to the earth resources, elemental processes, and nonhuman gestures that precipitate the arrangements of words in the poems as well as the air that mediates voice and the servers that store the poems as digital files. At times, in his article ‘Climate Geopoetics (The Earth is a Composed Poem)’, Magrane (2021) draws slightly back from the material-energetic potential of the poems, writing, ‘It’s unlikely that a poem can effect the change that would keep net global warming under 1.5 C’. Yet he playfully adds ‘ although how could one trace this?…”

“…For a climate geopoetics, this would mean being accountable to what we know, and ‘what we know sufficiently’ about climate change, while cultivating our capacities to respond to ‘what cannot be fully known or controlled’ (Neimanis, 2013: 103). As a practice that problematises the hubris in terms like ‘ultimate drivers’ (Steffen cited in Magrane, 2021), geopoetics is uniquely placed to cultivate humility in the face of the incalculable.…”

Gesturing toward the common and the desperation: Climate geopoetics’ potential

“…These definitions used to seem interchangeable to me; the former now reads as someone whose art guides and takes precedence in the act of doing geopoetics. Thus, when I read Magrane’s (2021) excellent piece, what interests me most are the moments where he writes of the places where poetry enables an encounter with the non-human world that de-centers the human.…”